Akihiro Miwa, a gender-fluid singer and actor who captivated the Japanese public with his high-femme glamour and who lent his resplendent, booming voice to beloved characters from animated films produced by the celebrated Japanese company Studio Ghibli, died on June 20. He was 91.
His death was announced on his official website. No location was given.
Mr. Miwa was best known to audiences abroad for his work in two animated films directed by Hayao Miyazaki, “Howl’s Moving Castle” (2004) and “Princess Mononoke” (1997).
In “Howl’s Moving Castle,” he played the Witch of the Waste, a corpulent villain clad in purple who is carried around town on a palanquin by an entourage of henchmen. Mr. Miwa’s rich voice transformed the familiar trope of a jilted lover determined to exact revenge into a three-dimensional character exuding feelings of yearning and loss.
But it was his turn as Moro, the ancient wolf goddess, in the environmental drama “Princess Mononoke” that made him one of Studio Ghibli’s most memorable collaborators. In the film, which was described in a review in The New York Times as “a landmark feat of Japanese animation,” Moro acts as a mother figure to the protagonist and helps battle humans who threaten the forest’s resources.
Taking his cue from Mr. Miyazaki, who instructed him not “to portray Moro as some kind of hero-like figure,” Mr. Miwa gave the character a deep baritone and a seismic cackle that emanated from the gut. Beneath the laugh, though, was a note of sorrow. Mr. Miwa’s Moro oscillated between tenderness and ferocity, male and female, deity and animal.
In Japan, Mr. Miwa was a mythic figure in his own right. Inspired by the cross-dressing terakoshō, temple pages of the feudal era, he began wearing women’s clothes as a young man in the mid-1950s.
“I dressed head to toe in purple and walked through Ginza” — Tokyo’s central shopping district — “singing as I went,” he said in a video interview in 2021. “People started saying, ‘There’s a purple ghost haunting Ginza!’ And that’s how I became famous.”
One of the first gender-fluid Japanese celebrities, he caught the attention of the renowned novelist Yukio Mishima, who cast him in a starring role in his play “Black Lizard,” which was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name.
In both the play and the film, he portrayed a duplicitous femme fatale who kidnaps the daughter of a wealthy jeweler with the goal of decorating an island lair with gemstones and the embalmed bodies of numerous attractive victims. (A shirtless Mr. Mishima made a cameo as one of those human statues.)
The film was a commercial and critical success, in part because of its transgressive depiction of sexuality. The image of the young Akihiro in a sequined gown caressing the inert body of Mr. Mishima, a literary superstar, and planting a kiss on the side of his mouth represented a watershed moment in Japanese cinema.
“Reporters used to warn me, ‘Don’t say you’re homosexual. You’ll be destroyed,’” Mr. Miwa recalled in the 2021 interview. “But I said, ‘No, go ahead and write it. I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t stolen anything.’”
He added: “This is part of Japan’s long history. It’s culture.”
He also refused to ignore another part of the country’s history: the atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II.
Growing up in Nagasaki as one of the hibakusha, or survivors of those bombings, he experienced acute symptoms of radiation poisoning, including hair loss and anemia, and sought to raise awareness of the horrors of nuclear war in his 1968 book “My Purple Biography.” In 2021, he condemned the Japanese government for refusing to ratify the international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
“For hibakusha, the abolition of nuclear weapons is only natural,” he told The Mainichi, a Japanese newspaper, in 2024. “The world needs to recognize that.”
Akihiro Miwa was born Akihiro Maruyama on May 15, 1935, in Nagasaki, where his parents owned a restaurant, a cafe and a public bathhouse.
He was 10 when the atomic bomb struck his hometown. “It was as if a million flashes of magnesium lit up all at once,” he recalled in 2021.
“Outside, it was hell,” he added, describing a man whose entire body was covered in keloid-like burns. “At every elementary school playground, there were rows — lines and lines — of corpses laid out.”
In 1951, he enrolled at the Kunitachi College of Music Senior High School in Tokyo but soon dropped out and began bartending, singing in the city’s chanson cafes and performing cabaret at gay bars.
Modeling himself after singers like Edith Piaf and Yvette Guilbert, he developed a cover of the French song “Mé Qué Mé Qué” that became a hit in 1957.
His most popular song, “Yoitomake no Uta,” a paean he wrote to blue-collar laborers, was released in 1965. The song, which was notable for his stripped-down performance — he sang it barefaced, in simple clothing — became a nationally recognized ode to the struggles of the postwar working class in Japan.
He met Mr. Mishima during his early days of tending bar, when he was a teenager. Mr. Mishima was drawn to his androgynous good looks and asked six times if they could meet. On the seventh time, Akihiro accepted.
When they finally met, Mr. Mishima asked if he wanted a drink.
“No, thank you, I’m not a geisha,” Mr. Miwa recalled saying in “Miwa: A Japanese Icon,” a 2010 documentary directed by Pascal-Alex Vincent. “He said, ‘You’re not nice.’ ‘I don’t have to be nice, I’m beautiful,’ I replied.”
Mr. Mishima liked his spirit, and they began a creative collaboration and friendship that lasted until Mr. Mishima’s death by hara-kiri in 1970, after a failed attempt to overthrow the Japanese government. That year, grieving the death, Akihiro changed his surname to Miwa.
He never married or had children. A list of survivors was not immediately available.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Miwa directed and starred in an acclaimed adaptation of Mr. Mishima’s “Five Modern Noh Plays.” He was also a muse to the avant-garde playwright Shūji Terayama, who cast him in the plays “Marie in Furs” and “The Hunchback of Aomori” in 1967.
From 2005 to 2010, Mr. Miwa co-hosted a weekly talk show, “The Spring of Aura,” on the Fuji TV network in Tokyo, discussing reincarnation and spirituality with celebrities. It was during that time that he adopted his signature neon-yellow hair and transformed himself from a pop-culture star into someone the public looked to for wisdom.
In a column that appeared in The Asahi Shimbun, he offered his advice to a young woman.
“The more I stay true to myself, the more I seem to stand out awkwardly from those around me. What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
He answered: “You have nothing to be ashamed of before a single soul. You stand out? Why, that is a splendid thing.”
